Fractals of the Year: 2011 – Revenge of the Orbits²

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy

TED – Daniel Wolpert: Why We Have Brains

What is the true purpose(s) of the brain? — Perception? Thinking? Speaking? — Dr. Wolpert argues that these are hardly the case, that in fact the main evolutionary purpose of the brain to control and produce complex adaptive movements, all the ways we interact with the world and control it through the actions our brains generate, using the processing of information from our perception and prior knowledge to select and undertake physical actions, even speech and looking about by moving our eyeballs, to gather more data from and affect the reality around us.

He makes a sound case that the ultimate reason we have brains is to affect the world around us to aid survival, and in the most direct way through physical acts.